Click fourteen. The mouse makes a hollow, plastic sound. My index finger is tired. This is for a fourteen-dollar taxi receipt. The system, a shimmering monument to progress that cost the company a reported $2,444,444, requires a two-factor authentication code from my phone, which is of course in the other room. After retrieving it and entering the 4-digit pin, I am presented with a dropdown menu. It contains 234 unique project codes. None of them, as far as I can tell, have anything to do with a taxi ride from the train station. I select ‘Miscellaneous Project Overhead – 44’ because it feels vaguely correct and I’ve lost the will to investigate further. A small, green notification bar flashes for a quarter of a second: ‘Success.’ But it doesn’t feel like success. It feels like I just paid a digital toll to prove I exist.

We keep getting this spectacularly wrong. We see a creaking, multi-layered, inefficient analog process held together by staples and institutional memory, and we think the solution is to make it digital. So we spend a fortune to hire consultants and developers to perfectly replicate the creaking, multi-layered, inefficient process on a screen. We call this ‘Digital Transformation.’ It’s not. It’s digital calcification. We’re taking organizational scar tissue and casting it in a beautiful, responsive, cloud-based epoxy resin. The scars are still there, they’re just shinier now.

Signaling Modernity, Preserving Dysfunction

The real, terrifying truth is that companies don’t buy enterprise software to solve a problem. They buy it to signal modernity. It’s a performance. The purchase order is a press release. The implementation is a declaration to the board and to the market that ‘we are doing something about our inefficiencies.’ But the underlying, dysfunctional workflow? That’s not a bug to be fixed. It’s a feature to be preserved. It’s the ritual. It’s the chain of command, the approvals, the checks and balances that were probably put in place 34 years ago in response to some long-forgotten scandal. To question the process is to question the history, the hierarchy, and the wisdom of the people who built it. It’s easier to spend $2,444,444 than to have that conversation.

Jasper S.K.’s Simple Question

I remember a union negotiator I used to know, Jasper S.K. He had this impossibly calm demeanor, like a man watching a river flow, even when people were screaming. Management at a manufacturing plant was incredibly proud of their new scheduling software. They gave a 44-minute presentation on its capabilities, the seamless interface, the real-time updates. They were beaming. Jasper didn’t touch the laptop. He just asked, “So, Carol’s job. She used to spend Monday to Friday, about eight hours a day, taking the paper slips from the 14 foremen and manually building the master schedule on the whiteboard. What does Carol do now?”

Jasper: “So Carol still does 44 hours of manual data entry a week, but now she’s typing instead of writing?”

“

He saw what they had missed entirely. They hadn’t improved the process; they’d just changed the font. They’d digitized the broken part. The real problem was the fractured data collection, the lack of a single source of truth, the fact that 14 different people were creating 14 different versions of reality that one person had to stitch together. The software didn’t fix that. It just gave the brokenness a login screen.

I’d love to say I’ve always been as clear-eyed as Jasper, but I haven’t. I once championed a project management system with a fury, convinced it would solve all our communication problems. I spent months mapping out our existing 24-step review process into the new system’s architecture. I built automated workflows, conditional triggers, the works. It was technically elegant. And it made everything worse. Approvals took longer. People were confused about where to find things. The friction had increased by a factor of four. My mistake was assuming the 24-step process was sacred. I never once stopped to ask if we needed 24 steps in the first place. I was so obsessed with building a better digital mousetrap that I never asked if we could just get rid of the mice.

This is why vanity projects are so seductive. It’s easier to focus on the artifacts of work than the work itself. I once worked with a company that, after a brutal 14-month software implementation that came in 234% over budget, flew the entire department to a resort for a ‘launch party.’ The software was barely functional, hated by the entire user base, and had actually decreased productivity by 14%. But we all stood on a beach, holding sticktails, being told what a historic success the project was. The only tangible thing of value we got from the whole ordeal was the schwag bag, which ironically contained one of those surprisingly high-quality Customized beach towels with the project’s codename on it. That towel outlasted the software by four years.

The Courage to Ask “Why?”

My brain sometimes feels like it gets rebooted after a good sneeze, and in the quiet moment that follows, the absurdity of things becomes crystal clear. It’s in those moments I realize we’re celebrating the digitization of handshakes and paperwork because the alternative is too difficult. The alternative is asking, “Why are we doing this at all?” That question is a threat to empires built on process. It’s a threat to the person whose entire job is to be Step 14 in a 24-step process. If you eliminate the step, you eliminate their comfortable, known world.

So, instead, we preserve it. We honor it with code. We build monuments to inefficiency and then train people on how to navigate them. It’s a strange kind of comfort, the digital equivalent of staying in a terrible relationship because you’re afraid of being alone. The brokenness is familiar. A truly new, streamlined process is unknown and frightening.

Beyond the Faster Horse: True Transformation

There’s another way, of course. It involves looking at the fundamental physics of the problem, not just the procedure. It’s the difference between building a faster horse and inventing the automobile. For instance, in the world of textiles and manufacturing, you could spend millions digitizing a convoluted, 44-day approval process for physical fabric samples that get shipped around the world. Or, you could work with a company that uses advanced digital printing technology, like Qingdao Inside Co., Ltd., to create a perfect digital twin of the fabric first. This doesn’t just speed up the old process; it obliterates it. It replaces the entire chain of shipping, waiting, and manual reviews with a single, verifiable digital asset. It changes the core task, rather than just repainting the cage we run in.

It’s a complete shift in mindset. It’s moving from “How can we do this broken thing faster?” to “How can we make it so we don’t have to do this broken thing at all?” That’s genuine transformation. It’s less about installing new software and more about deleting old assumptions. Jasper S.K. understood this instinctively. He wasn’t anti-technology; he was anti-stupidity. He knew that technology applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency, but technology applied to an inefficient operation will just magnify the inefficiency.

Jasper: “The silence was the most important part. That’s when you know the truth has landed. Not when people are shouting or arguing, but when they have to sit and confront the chasm between the story they’ve been telling themselves and the reality of the situation.”

“

They were celebrating a new screen that showed them exactly what their old whiteboard showed them. And for a moment, they saw it too.

That’s the goal. Not to buy the next platform, not to get the green success banner after 14 clicks. It’s to create that moment of silence. It’s to find the courage to look at a 24-step process for a fourteen-dollar receipt and just ask why.